Now with former eBay, Inc. (EBAY) CEO Meg Whitman at the helm, the company is trying to course correct and return to its core identity as a PC maker. The New York Timesreported late Thursday that Ms. Whitman planned to chop 30,000 jobs next week -- nearly 10 percent of HP's 324,000 person global workforce.

HP reports its earnings next Wednesday and the cuts are expected to be announced then. A second report from Bloomberg Business Insider pegged the number of expected layoffs slightly lower, at 25,000, which offers an indication that the precise number may be a "game-time decision" of source. Regardless, the number of layoffs is expected to be large (>20,000) come Wednesday.

In mobile devices, many of the issues boiled down to HP's decision to pick up a struggling device maker (Palm) and then put little effort into trying to turn it around, and then simply bailing out of the market when the results of its lack of effort hit the metaphorical fan.

In cloud computing, HP has quite a bit of product -- the problem is it's being overlooked. According to various sources HP has picked the wrong horse in the cloud computing race, betting on ultra-power efficient servers. Unfortunately, top cloud computing buyers such as Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) and Google, Inc. (GOOG) have increasingly prioritized lower prices over higher power efficiency. As a result HP is seeing Asian competitors who produce cheap commodity cloud servers earning much of the sales it had hoped to capture.

II. Doing More With Less -- a Solution or Just Punting the True Problems?

The layoffs are expected to mostly spare HP's growing Chinese unit, and instead focus on the U.S. and European units. The cuts are designed to free up cash to invest in restructuring.

The New York Times describes:

Ms. Whitman, who through a spokesman declined to be interviewed, plans to put money into sales technology for things like fast product quotes, customer tracking and servicing, and bill paying. The hope is that the money gained by job cuts will be used for an efficient, better-trained sales force that in turn can generate more cash.

In other words, HP is going to invest in trying to do the same amount of work with a smaller workforce -- a popular move of late in the post-recession U.S. market. While that approach may indeed improve margins, it may also leave a bad taste in the mouths of some investors that had hoped HP would make more drastic changes to its cloud computing efforts, or invest in resurrecting its dead mobile device lineup.

Some fear HP is punting on its true structural issues. [Image Source: How to Punt a Football]

Another concern is that there's no indication that HP will invest any of the savings in restoring HP Labs to its former glory. Investors fear that cutbacks to HP Labs, which started during the seemingly prosperous Mark Hurd era, may hurt HP's long-term success prospects.

Long a bastion of electronics industry research, HP Labs has continued to do novel work, such as inventing the memristor -- a long theorized circuit element, which could lead to new cheaper, more power-efficient kinds of storage. However, the cutbacks have forced the star institution to operate on a shoestring budget, raising questions of whether HP will be able to continue to attract top talent. The situation is so bad at HP Labs, according to The New York Times, that researchers are forced to use pirated software for their day-to-day work.

There are plenty of questions for HP as it prepares to announce its massive layoffs and restructuring. HP appears to be choosing the easy answer; an answer many of its corporate colleagues have opted for in the wake of the recession -- cut the workforce, while forcing current employees to work harder and more efficiently. The question at HP -- as with the other firms who have adopted this approach -- is whether that plan is maintainable as a long-term solution, and whether it really addresses the underlying structural issues that caused the company to go from growing to contracting.

Totally agree. Despite the criticism of Hurd, the fact is when he left they had more or less all the right tools to still be close to number one now.The sad part about all this is the staff who loose their jobs aren't the ones to blame for this problem, the responsibility lies solely with the Board of Directors. They were the ones that canned the TouchPad when it was plainly obvious they had to have an "iPhone equivalent" and an "iPad equivalent" on the market, but instead the Board of Directors binned both.To me, it just looks like the Board of Directors have decided to close shop.I really don't know how the staff at HP can even walk past the Directors offices without vomiting.

Dishonour and shame are essential prerequisites to Seppuku. I think this practice is extremely sad because it doesn't give a person the chance to make things right. I believe the Christian notion of repentance is very important in life.As much as I dislike the actions of the HP Board of Directors, no matter how much I feel they have acted dishonourably or shamefully, I wouldn't want them to kill themselves.What I think they should do is do their job right: directing HP along a path that leads towards a profitable future.

If shareholders, knowing the past performance of these people, choose to elect them to their Board of Directors, then that is their choice.As I'm not a shareholder in HP what I say is unimportant, but to me if I was a shareholder then I would be wanting answers as to why the direction they have taken the company was so patently wrong, and it has been patently wrong for a long time. As I said, Hurd had moved the company in the right direction for HP to be close to the top of the food chain, but then his successors squandered the opportunity his foresight had given HP even though it was apparent that the direction he had moved the company in was the right one.

Not even the Japanese commit seppuku anymore, now they do what americans do...make excuses and pretend to apologize. Look at all the political theatre around Fukushima Daaichi, you don't see TEPCO executives killing themselves, they're telling the public everything's peachy.

Enough with the armchair quarterbacking and time to be a realist. They are cutting 30k jobs so 245k people still have one to go to.

Do you guys see a booming world economy or something? Aside from Apple, Samsung, Microsoft and a few others the tech industry, as is many others, isn't exactly burning up the charts. Of course firings are going to happen, what the hell? Enough with the mellow-drama and acting like it's such a travesty. Stop pretending to be shocked and outraged. This should be expected.

We've lost 7 million jobs since 2009 in the U.S alone, since you-know-who took office. Who knows how many world wide. And that's all the fault of "greedy" corporations? Riiight.

Ah, but it falls into the Holy Grail of mismanagement, which states, "Thou shall do more with less", and is blessed by the CEO saying, "Go forth and be more efficient!"

Here's an idea. Every time a CEO comes up with the great idea of increasing efficiency by decreasing employees, we cut the CEO's salary by a similar percentage. Cut 10% of your workforce, that's 10% less responsibility you have as CEO, so you deserve 10% less salary. Cut 30% of your workforce, lose 30%. If time goes by, and the cutting actually served to increase productivity and profit, the board can elect to return some of that salary in the form of a bonus.

That way, maybe these mismanagers will learn that sometimes, you end up doing LESS with less.

"We are going to continue to work with them to make sure they understand the reality of the Internet. A lot of these people don't have Ph.Ds, and they don't have a degree in computer science." -- RIM co-CEO Michael Lazaridis